Yeah, you. You wanna get some free downloads of some early French armorials? Naw, this is the real deal, I'm tellin' ya. Sure they're high res. What else would they be? Oh, yeah, I remember some of those early ones. Well, those days are past. This stuff is primo. Take my word for it. Trust me!
Seriously, it sometimes pays to go back and revisit web pages that I've looked at before, because the web is not static, and things can - and do - improve.
In this particular instance, it was a post from way back in December 31, 2012, on La langue du blason, a French-language blog that I visit periodically. I'd kept track of this post because it had links to several early French armorials digitized and uploaded by the French National Library (BNF), but for some reason, while all of the links worked for me, the BNF site would only let me download some of the armorials linked, and not others. And frankly, I like to be able to download such things to my hard drive so that I can research them at my leisure without having to go on-line. It's particularly useful if I'm traveling, where I might not always have a good internet connection, and I can copy them to an external hard drive and look at them on my netbook wherever I happen to be, with or without an internet connection.
So I was thrilled to find that the BNF has added some new features to their website, and that when I clicked the link from La langue du blason to the BNF page for a particular armorial, there was another link there in English that said "Test the future version of Gallica and discover its simplified viewer. View this document in Gallica Labs." So I did, and I was able to download each armorial without any difficulty at all! For example, here's a page of arms from Brabant in a Rôle d'armes du voyage d'Outre-mer ou Rôle d'armes de Gaignières (BNF Ms Fr 23077):
Cool, huh? Want to see, or download, some of these rolls of arms yourself? Check out the links on this page from La langue du blason at http://lalanguedublason.blogspot.com/2012/12/nouveaux-armoriaux-en-ligne-sur-gallica.html#more
Enjoy! I certainly intend to do so with the ones I have now been able to add to the French armorials on my hard drive.
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